Introduction

You should know that the internet is a mean and nasty place. So you should follow the best of the best practices which Amazon gladly share.

Go to the IAM dashboard and secure your account before you start trying out or really using Amazon AWS.

Step 1: Identity and Access Management (IAM) Dashboard

Login to the AWS console and through the Service (top left next to the AWS icon) -> Select IAM -> which should show the Welcome to Identity and Access Management Dashboard.

Here you see four warnings, but in the future, there could be more.

Step 2: Activate MFA

This is probably the most important one to once you use AWS to host something for your business. You may want to buy a hardware-based MFA device.

I recorded a short video showing how you set up.

Step 3: Create an individual IAM user.

There is little point showing any screenshots here, Amazon does a brilliant job with the wizard to take you step by step through creating user accounts.

You’ll create an admin group in the process and at the end have a new user account and a URL you’ll need to keep in a safe place you use to login to the AWS Management Console, e.g. https://1234567890.signin.aws.amazon.com/console

Step 4: Apply an IAM password policy

Here you define what the minimum length of password your users should use, etc.